


This old road (that we walk anew)

by maharetr



Category: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Comfort/Angst, Everybody Lives, F/F, F/M, Misses Clause Challenge, Nightmares, Vomiting, references to cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 10:41:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2809403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maharetr/pseuds/maharetr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"They destroyed my things when they arrested me," Mina says. "I have no friends left there. I would come with you, if you'd have me."</p>
            </blockquote>





	This old road (that we walk anew)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Last_Winter_Rose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Last_Winter_Rose/gifts).



> Between me posting this work and go-live, this (totally unrevealed!) work managed to acrue 48 hits. o.0 The mods and I got nothing.

"Guys!" It's Ben stumbling into the candy cottage, eyes wide. "Um, she's..."

At first Hansel thinks the horror in Ben's expression is because Hansel is holding a decapitated witch's head, and fair enough. But Ben tears his gaze away from the head, from the shovel in Gretel's hands, and his eyes are still wide with fear.

"She's still alive," Ben says. " _Mina_ , she's --."

Well, shit. Hansel drops the head, and Gretel drops the shovel, and they're out the door at speed. Mina's lying on the ground still, where Hansel left her -- and that thought makes him wince with guilt. She’s got her hands pressed over her stomach, and there’s a yellow _glow_ coming from between her blood-covered fingers. _Witch_ his mind stutters, but his hands are already joining hers to keep up the compression.

“We need you, Ben," Gretel's saying behind them, in the steady, reasonable tone she reserves for people in shock. "The children need someone to help them back to town, can you do that?”

Hansel tunes out Ben's reply. Mina is pale, so pale, and her gaze is wandering. She should be dead. _She saved you_ , a little voice whispers in his head. But that had been his own blade, short and unpolluted by black magic. He doesn’t know how to cope with a gut wound this deep, caused by a witch's blade, nor one that smells this bad. The smell of shit in a gut wound means as good as dead, the quicker the better. 

Gretel is there, cupping Mina’s face with her hands.

“Mina. Mina, look at me. What do you need?”

Mina opens her mouth, coughs painfully. “Lair…” she manages.

“In the cottage?” Gretel asks, and she glances at Hansel, already asking with her eyes if he’s willing to go back and dig up whatever she needs.

Mina shakes her head. "Her lair. Your lair.”

Gretel, to her credit, barely flinches at the association. 

“It’s too far away," she says. "Can we bring you things?” There’s no time for that, Hansel thinks, but Gretel knows that too. He knows the calm, sad look in her eyes.

Mina shakes her head again. “I can make it,” she whispers.

Hansel tries not to wince. They could build a travois of sorts, but then it would be hours of slow, halting travel through the woods. It's no way for someone to spend their last hours. Gretel, apparently, is thinking something entirely different: 

"Edward!" she shouts. 

Edward it turns out, is a troll. Hansel grips his rifle hard, but no one else is panicking and the troll is ignoring him, staring down at Mina with his face crumpled in distress. Hansel has a moment of "yeah, buddy, me too," before he realizes he's sympathizing with a fucking troll. This really is a day of firsts.

"Good witch," Edward rumbles, and scoops Mina up in his arms, cradling her like a baby. He strides off like he knows exactly where he's going, and Gretel follows at a jog like she's not exhausted. Well, Hansel can pretend, too. 

Edward barges though the scrub like it's barely there, and they follow in his wake. It’s only as they reach the ruins of their old house that Hansel feels hope, painful and confusing, start to rise. He thought she’d died in his arms, and even after, that she was as good as dead -- he’d been constantly on the watch for Edward to go mad with grief. But now they’re at the house, and he's taking her from Edward's arms, Gretel is gently dismissing Edward to go back and help with the kids, and Mina's still alive; they're figuring out the actual entrance to the lair (trap door in the pantry), and she's still alive. They're lowering her down the ladder, and dear god, what if he jars her on the way down, what if, what if… 

Gretel lays her down on the table in the middle of the room.

It’s much easier to find their way around the lair during the day, even if the light is only through the ceiling hole. Hansel can see the disturbances in dusty shelves where Mina had grabbed jars and made ... things. He can see dried blood on the floor. His blood. He jerks his gaze away from it, and sets about lighting candles for the gloomy corners.

In the middle of the room, Gretel is following Mina's hoarse direction, mixing powders from the shelves, crushing herbs and adding liquids from Mina's pouch. She ends up with a paste that she can scoop with her fingers, and Hansel can help with this bit, at least: he rests his hands on Mina's shoulders, rubbing his thumbs soothingly as Gretel approaches. Gretel smears the concoction into the wound, and Hansel pins Mina while she writhes and tries not to scream.

Then Mina presses her own hands over the wound and tries to recite... it sounds way too close to witch language, and Hansel tries not to tense. _She did this to you_ he thinks deliberately instead, and it's probably all in his head, but it feels like his side tingles in sympathy. He resists the urge to touch the pale scar where his death should have been.

But whatever Mina did to him while he was unconscious, it doesn't seem to be working now. The light isn't getting any stronger, and she's still bleeding. 

Gretel presses her own hands over Mina's, leans close to catch Mina's words, and picks up the chant. Hansel still doesn't understand a damn word, but the light flares bright, enough to blind him with the after images.

It only takes a second for his vision to clear, but Mina is lying far more relaxed and her breathing has steadied.

"Again," Mina says, and Gretel pounds and mixes and applies. She presses her hands again, and speaks. Hansel isn't quite as quick a study, but he knows to look away at this point, and he does.

The second time is the charm: when he looks back, Gretel is gently wiping a cloth over Mina's side, revealing reddened scar tissue. _Scar tissue_. He bears his own, and it still makes him feel wobbly to look at. But then there are far more pressing things to worry about -- Gretel has slumped forward, and Hansel doesn't remember lunging forward to catch her.

"She's okay," Mina croaks. "She's tired."

"That better be all she is," Hansel growls, which is ungracious of him, he knows -- it's Mina who nearly died, after all -- but it's been a fucking long day. Okay, he's a stubborn asshole, but he's not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, either. "What does she need?"

Mina levers herself into a cautious sitting position.

"Water," Mina says, pointing to a stoppered jug. "Stir some of that white power into it, if you like." Hansel eyes the dusty bottle -- smeared from recent use -- and opens it.

"I need to chant over this?" He can't stop the snappishness, and even half dead there's a flare of snark in her reply: "No, just stir it in."

Gretel is sitting up now, leaning against the wall. She smiles shakily at him as she takes the cup. "Wow," she rasps, but she looks sort of excited, despite the exhaustion. "That's kinda something, isn't it?"

"Kinda is," he agrees, but he's not sure what something. He takes the empty cup from her, and squeezes her now free hand. It's mostly for his own reassurance, he's not afraid to admit. "You okay?"

"Yeah," she and rests her head back against the wall. _But not going anywhere for a while_ , he supplies. Plus, watching Mina cautiously sitting up in her bloodstained dress is way too unnerving, even if he knows she's healed.

"We could all do with some rest," Mina adds, this time gently. They'd all come damn close to dying today -- some more than others, but he's sure as hell including the heart attacks both Gretel and Mina have given him, damnit.

There's not much left in the way of ... anything, let alone bedding, in the house. It's a house full of faded memories and dust, but there's nothing that says 'home' anymore. He finds long-forgotten blankets in a trunk and a change of clothes for Mina, and brings them down to the lair. The two of them are sitting together on the floor now, murmuring together. He half-heartedly suggests he keep watch upstairs, but Gretel doesn't even need words for that; she just grabs his shirt with surprising strength and doesn’t let go. Mina is also shaking her head at him. Fine. Mina and Gretel sleep, their heads pillowed on his legs, where he can damn well keep an eye on their breathing, or whatever you're supposed to monitor for after a miraculous healing. He watches their chests rise and fall, and lets himself feel awash in a mix of frightened and unspeakably grateful.

~*~

It's early afternoon when he rouses them, and the two of them start foraging outside through the long-wild garden for things Mina could use. _Witchy things_ , but the idea is not as instantly as repellant as it was a few hours ago. He attempts sleep of his own with relative success.

They return with green-smelling things, and dirt under their nails. Mina lights more candles -- from a striking paper, Hansel notes, although he's not sure if she's just being polite, or if she needs it -- and starts studying jars and decanting things. Gretel comes and sits beside him, rests her head on his shoulder.

"This isn't home," he says, because he feels the need to speak it, if only to the dead air around them.

"It was," Gretel says, but she's not objecting. "It was, but not anymore." She takes his hand in his lap, squeezing firmly. He nods, agreeing with both her words and gestures: home hasn't been a building to them for a long, long time.

"We're not going back to Ausburg tonight," Gretel says. Okay then; Hansel starts rolling blankets, and catches Mina's eye: 

"But we'll walk you back," he offers. "If you want to go home."

Mina barely hesitates. "They destroyed my things when they arrested me," she says. "I have no friends left there. I would come with you, if you'd have me." 

Having a trained magical healer will be damn useful, says the logical part of Hansel's brain. The rest of him plain just doesn't want to see the back of her. 

~*~

They start out by matching their pace to Mina's, which makes it a gentle but steady stroll. They make it a good mile or two before Gretel's stride starts to lengthen, and she's subtly trying to hold herself back.

Gretel likes, the first while after a major job, to be quiet and ground herself again, and this has been one of their more spectacular jobs. Even as he watches, he can see Gretel's stride lengthening into something smooth and easy that she could keep up for hours. She wants to stride forward; even trying to consciously control her speed, she's drifting ahead, and has to slow to Mina's pace. Usually Hansel would stride with her, regardless of the sort of shape he was in, because damned if he was leaving her alone. But there's Mina to think of, so he scans the woods around them instead, looking for danger. He can hear birds, and creatures scuttling through the undergrowth and... normal sounds. And normal sounds are unusual enough to be unsettling, he realizes ruefully.

"We got all of them, didn't we?" Gretel says, even as Hansel draws breath to comment. "Things feel..." she gestures, vaguely. "They're _gone_."

"I think we did," Mina agrees. "It'd be safe to sleep out here, if you really didn't want to go back to Ausburg tonight."

Hansel tilts his head to the path beyond. "Want to go scout us a campsite?"

Camping out was also something they did after a job sometimes, but that wasn't always about grounding and feet-finding. Sometimes it was about nightmares and not wanting to wake an entire inn. Gretel shrugs a shoulder, and that's a rueful yes. Hansel raises his own shoulder in agreement: Mina feels like a comfortable addition walking between them. If she was going to freak out on them, she may as well do it while they were still close to town.

Gretel flashes him a grin and lengthens her stride immediately. She's _fine_ on her own, but that doesn't stop Hansel looking twitchily after her as she disappears around a the bend.

They watch the road ahead for a while. It's not an entirely comfortable silence.

"She's still your sister," Mina said.

"Of course she fucking is," Hansel hisses, because that part is never in doubt, he realizes. But that wasn't the thoughts that were making him feel sick.

"Are there other grand white witches?" he asks to get the thoughts out of his head.

"Some. A few. Many have burned." Hansel rubs a hand over his face. That is directly not helping -- the horror is worming its way back into his mind: how many witch-burning towns had they passed by, unchecked? How many Gretels and Minas had he let burn? "You didn't let them burn me," Mina points out, gently. 

Hansel looks at her, side on. "Can you read minds, too?"

She chuckles. "I can read _you_ like a book. But minds, no." 

"We wanted something that would protect us from fire, too," Mina admits after a while. "One of us sacrificing herself to save the many, we would do, maybe. But murdering _children_ , innocents, no. Paying the rest of that price ..." Mina gestures with a grimace. "Magic is neutral, a flow. What you do with it -- harm or heal, help others or ourselves -- that's what defines the witch. So we died, rather than murder children." Mina shrugs wryly. "Dying rather than murdering children seemed the better deal, all round."

"How do we make sure Gretel stays good?" The idea that Gretel might turn bad is a whole new level of horror. "Can we help her?"

Mina nods. "She wants me to. And she's going to need you, very much, in the days to come. She is raw power that she doesn't know how to control. So she'll run herself dry many times while she learns, I think. She needs people to keep her grounded, and she needs another grand white witch to help her with the more complicated things. Most witches are trained from a young age. I don't know if your mother tried to teach her anything...?"

"Not consciously. Not that I remember. Where do we find one?"

"We keep low profiles," Mina admits. "But there is one I know of a long way south."

"Treacherous journey? Lots of terrible evil things on the way?" Hansel asks, hopefully. "Give me a couple of days, and I will totally be up for killing a lot of terrible evil things."

Mina laughs, and it's a clear, happy sound.

 

~*~

He has no idea if Mina has slept rough before, but she shows no signs of complaining. 

It's a warm enough night that they can divvy up the blankets comfortably. Witches or no witches, it never paid to turn your back on the dark, and it's Mina who volunteers to take first watch.

He settles his bedroll near Gretel's and watches as she settles into sleep. He watches over her for a while before he lets himself drift off. 

After jobs, particularly their successful ones, Gretel dreams of what could have been. Oftentimes, their first could-have been: she dreams of an empty cage, the smell of roasting meat, and the witch snarling "Eat.." forcing flesh into her mouth --.

He wakes before she does. She's screaming between clenched teeth, and he risks a punch to shake her awake, but she's mostly just fighting the blankets tangled around her legs. He whispers to her as she retches, and - this is new - throws up. It’s been a long while since it was this bad, but he kneels with her, stroking her hair away from her face, rubbing her back until she’s dry heaving.

He's aware of Mina politely stoking the fire, close to hand but giving them space, and he loves her in that moment. 

He tries to coax Gretel up, and she rises without argument, leaning on him, and that’s unsettling in itself. He takes her away from the crackle of the fire, of any lingering smells of their rabbit dinner. He settles them under a tree a little distance away, so that it's just the two of them, and Gretel can crack apart in private.

“I was…” She chokes on a sob.

“Dreaming,” he insists softly. “You were dreaming.” He resists the urge to rock her - probably not great for her stomach - and goes for kissing the top of her head instead.

“I was _with_ her,” Gretel continues, doggedly. “I was sitting _with_ the witch, and we were - we were...”

“I know,” he murmurs. She gulps gratefully, but she doesn’t relax. He holds her, and waits.

“I had the rot,” Gretel whispers.

“You don’t,” he says, immediately, involuntarily. “You were dreaming. You fucking do not have the rot, I swear to you.”

“Check me,” she says.

He nearly refuses. But it’s too early in the morning for rationality to hold any sway, and her breath does stink of bile even if the cause is completely innocent. They stand, none too steady on their feet, either of them, and head back to the fire.

Mina has washed away the evidence of the nightmare -- Gretel’s blanket hangs from a tree branch, and that right there makes her a keeper.

She offers Gretel a cup of water, and Gretel takes it and gargles, rinses, repeatedly. Then Gretel turns to him and opens her mouth. He checks her gums, her nose, raises her eyelids to check her eyes, tilts her head to check her ears and the sides of her neck.

"No rot," he promises, wrapping her in a hug. She clings back tightly. "Thank you," she whispers into his shoulder.

“There are blessings I can do,” Mina offers after beat. “They deter evil things, soothe the mind; make it less susceptible to night terrors." Gretel part-opens her mouth, looking like she might demure. "You’ve saved my life twice now," Mina says. "Let me do something in return?”

It sounds like hokum to him, something a charlatan would charge silvers for at the fair. But as Mina lays out things by the fire: a small chalice, an inscence stick, herbs from the garden, a candle stub, he starts to remember the people that would come sometimes to the farm with toothaches or restless babies or just a slumped, weary set to their shoulders. She would take them away upstairs, and they would re-emerge sometime later: calmer, grateful.

Hansel sits on the other side of the fire and attempts to reserve judgement. 

Mina offers Gretel the chalice, murmurring ritual words. Gretel sips, keeps her hands around the chalice and offers it, and the ritual words, in return. Mina's smile is surprised, and then warms as she steps in to drink. They're both still holding the chalice. Hansel doubts any of their mother's rituals involved resting foreheads together like that, but...

He quietly collects his rifle and eases away for second watch.

Some hours later, after his timer has buzzed and he's taken his medicine, he heads back to camp. Gretel and Mina have combined bedding and are curled around each other, deeply asleep. He wakes Gretel as gently as he can, trying not to disturb Mina.

Gretel wakes calm and alert. Any shadows from the nighmare are gone; he'd give even odds on the blessing or the sex, at this point, not that he minds which. “Your turn for watch,” is all he needs to say, and she nods. She eases out from Mina’s embrace, who stirs far more sleepily. Gretel dresses quickly behind him, while he hesitates. Gretel has enticed away many of his bed mates over the years, but this is the first time he’s faced one after the fact. One he wants to stay with them. It’s a whole new set of uncertainties. 

Mina cracks an eye open and looks up at him. "You're thinking very loudly," she mumbles, and shifts over to make room. He sheds his first layers of clothes and gets under the blanket. She’s warm, she rests her head on his chest, hooking a leg between his, and he lets himself breathe as she falls back asleep against him. _Witches_ he thinks, stroking her hair, and the idea is starting to settle comfortably in his mind. He has no idea what that's going to hold but ... South then, with a lot of terrible evil things to kill on the way. He can do that.


End file.
